From Industrial to Organic
If you have spent any time looking at, or thinking about, the history of mass education than you certainly know that the Industrial Revolution was arguably the most significant factor in the creation of the educational system that most of us have come to know. But I want to pause here for a moment to note the importance of the word ‘education’ before system, rather than the word ‘school’ - and if you have never thought about the differences between these terms that we so commonly throw around, then it’s time to give them some thought. I want you to grapple with them. What exactly do they mean? Are they in fact different? And if so, how?
What is education?
What is schooling?
What is learning?
If right now I shared with you an answer to each, I’d rob you of the chance to actually think through each term, so while they ruminate, let’s go back to the link between industrialism and education.
The Industrial Revolution and the associated mass migration of people from rural to urban landscapes gave rise to new institutions across Europe and North America, and within that movement sprang a demand for organized mass education. Built like a pyramid, it was designed to match the needs of industrialism; the need for an abundance of manual workers and few college graduates created a broad base of compulsory education for all, followed by a smaller section of secondary education, and concluding with a tiny apex of higher education. The system of mass education then mirrored the majority of industrial processes. Produce identical versions of the same product; mold students to specific requirements. Compliance to industry specific rules and standards; create standards based on compliance to curriculum, teaching and assessment. Both models formulated on a linear process of sequential stages, where testing measures are used to control progress and movement between stages. And just like factories, secondary and post-secondary education was eventually organized around the same division of labour principle.
While our education system has come a long way in the array of programs offered, the teaching methodologies and pedagogy used to differentiate instruction and assessment for multiple intelligences and varying needs, it would be foolish to argue that the core principles and processes of industrialism are not still the driving force behind the organization of our current system.
Having grown up in this system as a student, having two parents who worked in this system, and having worked in it myself for almost a decade, it’s what I knew; it’s what we all know. It’s what we are comfortable with. It’s what makes sense to us, whether as parents or as teachers. But as I have furthered myself from this system, it has become increasingly clear that in order for learning (acquiring new knowledge and skills) to be both meaningful and lasting, we must create a framework of education (organized programs of learning) where there are an array of schools (any community of people that come together to learn with each other), rather than only the conventional facilities that we have grown accustomed to; the only thing we know as “school”.
This type of change is not easy, because in our lifetime, unlike almost everything else, education has never seen true seismic change. Even with the rise of private schools, the teaching/learning/schooling model largely remains the same. Most families paying for private school are in fact paying, more or less, for the same model - there just happen to be fewer bodies in the factory, but the industrial processes remain the same.
Every day, we take our mixed-aged school group out to explore our property on what we like to call adventure walks. There obviously aren’t any desks, or books, or pencils. We don’t teach a specific lesson, because, well… adventure walking isn’t even a “subject”. I’m sure to most of the people who follow our social media, and watch our daily Instagram story we are just out “playing”, because there is no test for adventure walking, you can’t assess successful adventuring walking based on a rubric full of criteria, and there definitely isn’t a letter grade or a percentage on a report card for adventure walking. And so, it’s perceived as playing, not as learning (although play is in fact one of the very best forms of learning regardless of age) because ultimately this type of schooling is not one that we can recognize, identify with, and easily understand.
Last week our students choose to spend a few hours tracking and following streams that sprung up from the spring snow melt, where they eventually uncovered a waterfall. The first “REAL” waterfall many had ever seen. They screamed with excitement, they splashed, they played, they led the journey, they asked questions, they listened, and they synthesized it all in order to make meaning, to acquire knowledge, and to learn. There wasn’t an exit card* used to determine exactly what they had learned, or better yet, what they could regurgitate back to me. Because, I am certain, that by choosing this opportunity themselves, by immersing themselves in something authentic to our changing seasons, that both the memory of this experience will last and the learning will stick. When “creative schools” advocate and guru Ken Robinson speaks about the need for organic education, he argues “that education will only improve when we understand that it too is a living system, not an industrial process, and that people thrive in particular conditions and not in others.” Nothing has become more clear to me than the fact that children thrive in conditions where they have personal freedom to explore and to create, when they have a sense of control and the ability to make choices, and when they can follow their own interests and passions. But when they are reduced to being data, when they are cogs or products in the industrial machine of education, most become bored and disaffected, and the joy of learning that is intrinsic to the human species is slowly eroded. Robinson further argues that we must shift education in the same way that industrial farming has more recently evolved and changed to organic agriculture; it is time for education to mirror the latter.
I will attempt to succinctly outline this metaphor, albeit far less eloquently than Ken Robinson. The primary goal of industrial farming is to produce higher yields of crops and animals, and like farming, industrial education has become increasingly more focused on outputs and yields; the rise of standardized testing and improving test scores, raising the number of graduates, data driven school improvement plans - the list is quite long and extensive. Industrial farming sees large tracts of single crops doused in chemical fertilizers and pesticides, or cramped and unhealthy conditions for animals that are injected with hormones to grow larger and faster. These measures are undoubtedly efficient and highly successful in terms of yield, despite the adverse conditions created. Then in education we have ever-increasing class sizes, reduced funding and support for educational assistants and special education programs, cut backs to the music, art, home-economics, automotive; anything that is hands-on and experiential. So just like farming, students and teachers are subjected to conditions that, while churning out “literate” graduates in impressive numbers, inhibit true growth and development as disengagement, boredom, and apathy run rampant. And just like the drug-injected animals, the number of drug-dependent students has never been greater. The yields may be high, but in both cases there is a price to be paid.
But Robinson gives us hope in how he describes the changing landscape of farming:
“In the last thirty years especially, there has been a growing movement to implement alternative forms of organic farming [where] the emphasis is not primarily on the plants, but on nurturing the soil itself. If the the eco-system is diverse and well-managed, the health of plants will increase along with the yields.”
So it’s time we look at the soil of education because our plants - our students, our children - deserve to grow in a space that cultivates healthy, vibrant, deep, and active learning. With a diverse and well-managed educational environment, we need not worry about the yield, it will surely be fine.
To build something new in the educational landscape has been scary, and it has certainly been challenging to relay a new conceptual framework to others in our community. It has taken time, and it has taken a steadfast belief in knowing what children deserve, and knowing that “just because it’s always been like this” or because “it worked fine for me” certainly does not mean it’s effective in the present, or for the future. We hope to be ONE of MANY SCHOOLS in a grassroots revolution that will transform education from the industrial to the organic, because learning and schooling should be about finding the right fit for every child. They aren’t identical factory produced products. They are all different, and they need more choices. They need more change.
* Exit Card - A classroom strategy that requires students to respond to questions or prompts on a piece of paper that they will pass in to the teacher before they leave class. They are designed to be both content review at the end of a daily lesson for students and a formative assessment tool (tools used during the learning process in order to modify teaching and learning activities to improve student attainment) for teachers. Such cards require students to be able to effectively communicate their thinking through written communication.
If we had used an exit card for our water-tracking adventure walk it could seek explanations for concepts such as the effect of slope on run-off, the water cycle, the three states of matter.
References & Further Reading:
Robinson, Ken. Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education. Penguin Books (2015).